Date: Monday, 11 May 2026, 16:15 pm to 17:45 pm
Venue: C601, Bismarckstr. 1
About: This event is organized by the Chair of Language and Cognition
Title: Asymmetries between comprehension and production across child bilingual groups: the role of modality and task demands.
About the speaker: Theo Marinis (Universität Konstanz) is a Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on language acquisition and processing across populations of typically and atypically developing learners and aims to uncover the nature of language processing in typical and atypical language development.
Abstract
Most research on child bilingualism has used production and off-line comprehension tasks, typically comparing bilingual to monolingual children. These studies often report lower performance among bilinguals, reinforcing a deficit-oriented view of bilingualism. By contrast, research on sentence processing in bilinguals is comparatively limited, and even fewer studies have addressed how bilingual children process sentences in real-time. In this talk, I will review studies investigating online sentence comprehension and production in bilingual children. Taken together, these findings suggest that, despite challenges in production, bilingual children largely process sentences in ways that are comparable to their monolingual peers. This evidence calls into question deficit-based accounts of bilingualism. At the same time, it raises a key question: how can we reconcile the divergence between production-based and processing-based measures? I conclude by considering possible explanations for this discrepancy and outlining directions for future research that can empirically test these accounts.